Law schools do students a disservice by treating legal-research & writing (LRW) professors like third-class citizens.

It’s been like this since I went to law school in the 1990s, and it’s largely still like this today.

Dear 1L, No 1L wants to spend all weekend inside writing a legal memo, but many of you will be.

Please know that even seasoned lawyers get stuck when writing up a legal analysis that’s new to them.

I also started a “book journal,” so I’d have someone to talk to.

It’s been a lonely road, so far.

Going round and round in my own head.
Listening to people who put me down.

Dear 1L,

As you know, law-school ethics codes prevent anyone from assisting with specific, 1L writing assignments before final drafts are submitted.

I see these memos after-the-fact, when I help students with job applications.

There’s also CRAC, TRAC, and TREAC.

I could go on, but won’t.

And instead of explaining it to you in writing now, I’m working on finishing a fictional model “Memo” for you that illustrates the basic structure.

That’s someone just a few years above you.

{—Of course you must follow all your professor’s rules and style preferences, but otherwise, forget them as your Reader.}

This is AFTER these resumes have been through multiple career-services-office reviews,

AFTER these resumes have been sent to hundreds of law firms and other prospective employers, and,

LONG AFTER the students have been through the formalized OCI process.

That was me in Oct. 1993, and I thought the world was going to end.

To be sure, like most all 1L midterms, it was merely a “practice” exam.

But to me, it was devastating.

“Have I done enough?”

Follow these 7 Steps to make sure you don’t miss a key case.

🔹 1. Find, pull, and skim 3 relevant cases (found from secondary sources, sample briefs, searches under keywords & headnotes, etc.).

RULE:

In addition to the obvious (that you must capitalize “court” whenever you write out its full Bluebook citation), there are only 3 other instances that require or permit capitalization:

1️⃣ CAPITALIZE SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)

🔷 PRIMER

🔸 Most 1L exams (and all bar exams) present a hypothetical fact pattern followed by a general “Discuss” prompt (or a set of questions that identify which issues you are to discuss).

I’ve noticed that many of you start posts with the word “As,” as in:

“As a lawyer,”
“As a law student,” or
“As an [anything].”

⚠️ Doing that is dangerous. In fact, you need to watch out for any sentence that starts with “As a . . .”